We are 100 Gunners from across Canada, serving and retired, Regular and Reserve, male and female. We all wear the same cap badge; the badge of The Royal Regiment of Canadian Artillery (RCA).

Last Sunday we boarded buses at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris (although some of us had arrived earlier in the week) and our first stop was the Normandy beach where The Winnipeg Rifles landed on June 6, 1944. For many of the Gunners, especially those under thirty years of age, it was their first experience in France - as it had been for thousands of other young Canadians on D-Day, 1944.

The afternoon and the next day were educational and emotional; with visits to the adjacent beaches where The Canadian Scottish and The Regina Rifles landed on D-Day; accompanied by RCA forward observers and by engineers and signalers, and closely followed by tanks and artillery guns. Our tour guides expertly described the events of that 1944 day and answered our many questions. They are both RCA officers (BGen Dave Patterson, a Reservist and currently Deputy Commander of 4 Canadian Division) and (LCol (Retired) Brian Reid, formerly Regular Force and a published author of Canadian military histories).

In the heart of all of this is the Juno Beach Centre. It is a wonderful museum and interpretive centre and is visited by tens of thousands of Canadians, French and others each year. The guides are Canadian students, all bilingual and each one hired for the spring to fall “season”.

During our Normandy days we visited Verrieres Ridge, Hill 67, Carpiquet Airfield, Pegasus Bridge, Abbaye d’Ardenne and, of course the Canadian cemetery at Beny-sur-Mer. All are memorable examples of courage and sacrifice.

Tuesday morning at the Beny-sur-Mer Cemetery was a time of solemn remembrance and reflection. We were joined by 100 Canadian Signalers (RCCS), serving and retired, Regular and Reserve, male and female who are on a similar tour. We were 100 uniformed Canadian RCA and RCCS soldiers plus 100 RCA and RCCS retirees; a total of 200 Canadians, including our RCA trumpeter and our RCA piper. Representatives of each group placed wreaths at the Cross of Sacrifice and then the individual serving soldiers placed an RCA flag or an RCCS (Signals) flag at the grave of every RCA and RCCS soldier. This Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) cemetery is, predictably, beautiful, peaceful and immaculately maintained.

In this, and in other cemeteries of both World Wars, there are over 52,000 Canadians buried in France.

On Tuesday morning, we were aboard our buses and heading toward Dieppe. For 90% of us it was our first visit to the site of this August 1942 raid on the German-occupied coast of France. Standing on the pebbled beach at Dieppe, our guides briefed us on the battle and on individual unis actions and answered numerous questions. We were then driven to the CWGC cemetery and walked among the rows of headstones, most of which are Canadian and almost all of those are dated August 19, 1942.

Tonight (Wednesday) we are in Ypres after visiting the nearby Canadian memorial at St Julien, where the first gas attack on the Western Front was resisted and endured by Canadian soldiers. We also had an opportunity to visit Passchendaele and the enormous CWGC cemetery at Tyne Cot.

We visited the Ypres “Cloth Hall”; destroyed during WWI but rebuilt as a magnificent structure in the heart of Ypres. It is now largely occupied by a splendid, modern, museum with a focus on the First World War. Our tour of this museum culminated with a dinner on the main floor. This took place in a huge room with stone pillars, stone floors, wooden beams and a meal of tomato soup, Belgian beef stew and chocolate mousse.

The most enduring memory of Ypres, however, was the ceremony at the Menin Gate. Every evening hundreds of visitors attend a memorial ceremony at this very significant Ypres city gate; an imposing memorial structure engraved with the names of tens of thousands of British, Canadian and Empire (Commonwealth) WWI soldiers who have no known grave. Our Canadian serving soldiers (RCA and RCCS), wearing uniforms and medals, were formed up under the arches, the Belgian buglers played The Last Post and wreaths were placed in memory by the Colonel Commandant of the RCA and the Colonel Commandant of the RCCS. Inside the arches and around the memorial were three or four hundred spectators, including the retired members of our tour group. Our RCA piper played and, after several other groups placed wreaths, the ceremony came to an end and darkness fell once again on the city of Ypres.

Today, Thursday, we will continue in the direction of Vimy Ridge and will be there on Sunday in time to participate in the 100th anniversary of that iconic Canadian battle,.​Stu